Back in the sixties, Lyndon Johnson formed Volunteers in Service to America. Kennedy had formed the Peace Corps, and Johnson declared that his VISTA would be the domestic equivalent of Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

Whatever VISTA is like now (I think it still exists), I know what it was like in the crusading minds of the youth of the sixties. Upper-class kids, contemptuous of the values that had made their parents rich, wanted to give up the comforts of that wealth for which they had such disdain, and do something “real” with their lives instead. Laudable, right? They wanted to do this because they were better human beings than their greedy, capitalist parents. They wanted to suffer the hardships and indignities of actually living with The Poor—so that they could help them, teach them hygiene (everybody knew how filthy the people of Appalachia were), teach them how to pursue “rights,” teach them what to eat (to stop eating possum and such, I guess), teach them, in short, how they were supposed to live.

Interviews of the volunteers were published in major news magazines by enthusiastic reporters, along with photographs of Appalachian “poor people,” who lived, as everyone “knew,” in virtual nests of incest and abuse—the consequence, of course, of ignorance and poverty. (Everybody knew that. They’d read the trashy fiction, seen the sensational and often fictionalized “documentaries.”) The VISTA volunteers were the heroic, self-sacrificing youth of America who would redeem the country from its capitalist, imperialist, selfish past. Right. So they set off to save Appalachian Poorpeople.

I lived in Europe at the time, but I read the news, the interviews, etc., and having grown up not too far removed from those Poorpeople, I had misgivings. And something about the heroism of the VISTA workers wasn’t right, either, but admiration of them seemed to be universal, so I thought it was just me.

A while later, on the back pages, came the news. Those Poorpeople had run the heroic volunteers off with shotguns. “Why would they do that?” demanded my husband. “The VISTA volunteers were just trying to help them!” (My husband had come from a background not unlike that of the volunteers.) I couldn’t answer his question, but I wasn’t surprised. Pride is an insidious thing, never more arrogant than when it poses as righteousness. What the Poorpeople said was, “Get off my land!” but what their shotguns said was, “Too bad you don’t have any self-respect of your own, but you’re not taking mine!”

Now, some people never invest in a good mirror, and so they never learn something it’s important to know, like humility. We have whole groups of them, organized into social ideologies, political parties or whatever, held together by the glue of their mutual self-admiration. Not knowing that what they call “love” isn’t love at all, but projected self-hate, they’re easily recognizable by their condemnation of anyone not afflicted with their disease. Sometimes, when their numbers are strong enough, or when they’ve collectively swept something important in their history too far under the rug, they form national governments. Then they’re really dangerous.

But I remember my husband’s reaction to the VISTA workers’ experience, and I see the reaction of certain English public figures following the recent riots. The irony is that, like my husband, they condemn others for lack of respect. Buy a mirror, one wants to say, but they’re too mired in their (God deliver us from it) “charity.” They wouldn’t get it.